Category talk:English point-in-time adverbs

RFM discussion: September 2014–December 2020

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

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Category:English temporal location adverbs to Category:English punctual adverbs

I think "punctual" is the more common way to describe these? —CodeCat 23:41, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

"Temporal adverb" is much, more common, though it may include a more diverse group of adverbs DCDuring TALK 00:19, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I believe that we are making a mistake to treat all of these in subcategories of parts of speech. We can be free of the tyranny of the word classes that users are familiar with for purposes of categories of this kind, though sadly not for headings. There are nominals that are not nouns, MWEs that are not phrases of any kind. Forcing a category structure to be hierarchical is convenient in a bureaucratic kind of way, but it does a great deal of violence to the reality of things. DCDuring TALK 00:27, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

There was Category:Latvian temporal adverbs, which I renamed to Category:Latvian time adverbs while also creating Category:English time adverbs. I did this because "temporal" seems like a higher-register word, which is like the distinction between "location" and "locative" - and we already had Category:English location adverbs as noted in the discussion below. So I figured that "time" was a better lexical counterpart to "location" than "temporal". Using "temporal location" is confusing as it gives the impression that these adverbs indicate a place, which they don't of course. But it also misses the point of the category. The defining characteristic is that these refer to punctual moments in time, analogous to adverbs which denote stationary position. They contrast with adverbs like "yearly" or "for a year" which denote frequency and duration respectively. These, of course, are also temporal location adverbs, but they don't belong in this category as they have their own categories (Category:English frequency adverbs and Category:English duration adverbs), so the suggested new name is an attempt to make this more explicit. —CodeCat 21:01, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Note that the other categories both use nouns attributively instead of adjectives, eg, not "frequent adverbs", but "frequency adverbs". The nouns are chosen because they have a different meaning than the adjectives. "Punctuality" obviously doesn't cut it. Can you think of any other one- or two-word nominal that would be better than "temporal location"? DCDuring TALK 14:04, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose. Ain't broke. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:14, 20 September 2014 (UTC)
  • It is, see my reply above. —CodeCat 21:01, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

DCDuring is right that "temporal adverbs" is a lot more common than "punctual adverbs". The latter phrase gets only 50 non-redundant raw Google hits, and 47 Google Books hits; the former phrase gets at least 43 pages of Google Books hits (43x10 = 430 hits) before the hits stop actually containing the phrase. "Temporal location adverbs" is the least common of the bunch, getting only 6 Books hits, and it's a moronic / oxymoronic name, because it states that the adverbs refer to places, which they do not. So the question is whether it's sufficient to relabel these as "temporal adverbs", or necessary to give them the narrower label "punctual adverbs"? Are there enough of them that the narrow categorization is necessary? Is the narrow label one people will understand? - -sche (discuss) 22:00, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, as it is now, we have Category:English time adverbs, but it's a parent category to various other types of adverbs with an aspect of time. The adverbs in question here are just one type. So it wouldn't make so much sense to have "temporal adverbs" as a subcategory of "time adverbs". But it also wouldn't make much sense to have "frequency adverbs" as a subcategory of "temporal adverbs" if the latter is meant to indicate points in time specifically. —CodeCat 17:05, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

• It stays put Kilo Lima Mike (talk) 20:36, 29 December 2020 (UTC)